In the first decade of the twelfth century, the Benedictine monk Hugh of Fleury of the monastery of Saint Benoît-sur-Loire at Fleury (France) wrote his Historia Ecclesiastica (HE), a compendium of world history, beginning with the legendary Assyrian king Ninus and continuing up to the time of Charlemagne (ca. 800). In the Middle Ages, the HE was very popular; it exerted great influence and was used as a source by influential authors such as Vincent of Beauvais and William of Malmesbury. Hugh wrote two versions (HE I and HE II, in 1109 and 1110 respectively), and afterwards revised the second version.
Until now, there has not been a complete edition of this important source for our knowledge of early twelfth-century historiography in Western Europe. The only edition of the HE which aimed, more or less, at completeness, was made by Bernhard Rottendorff (Münster, 1636), who used only one manuscript, which contained a contaminated and accordingly unreliable witness of the text of the Historia Ecclesiastica. Even more important is the fact that we now know, thanks to its discovery by André Wilmart in 1938, that the Vatican Library has preserved the very manuscript in which Hugh himself revised HE II: MS. Reg. lat. 545.
This thesis shows that MS. Reg. lat. 545 is not only Hugh’s own working model, but that the text of this manuscript before he revised it must be regarded as a second draft (HE II) by the author, which, just like the first one (HE I), had its own tradition. Unfortunately, about one third of this very important HE manuscript has not survived.
The present edition offers the text of the author’s final version, mainly based on MS. Reg. lat. 545. The parts which are missing in this MS have been reconstructed with the help of the manuscript tradition of all three authorial redactions.